The Implicit Prosody of Corrective Contrast Primes Appropriately Intonated Probes (for Some Readers)

Abstract

Studies of silent sentence reading have shown indirect evidence for the impact of a default projected "implicit prosody" on sentence processing, such as longer processing times for sentences with final syntactic interpretations inconsistent with their assumed default prosody (e.g. Fernández, 2003). While explanations of such effects associate them with the presence of an auditory image, or "inner speech", there is no direct evidence tying such an image directly to the measured effects--that is, there is little information about how implicit prosody "sounds" in the mind of the reader. In two visual-to-auditory cross-modal priming experiments, we look for evidence of a link between the implicit prosodic contour generated during silent reading and the explicit prosodic contour pronounced on a subsequentlypresented auditory probe word. Pairs of text sentences that contained corrective contrasts (e.g. Jacquelyn didn't pass the test. Belinda passed the test.) were immediately followed by probes pronounced with pitch accent patterns consistent (BELINDA) or inconsistent (BELINDA) with the corrective contrast in the read text. Results in an initial experiment showed no priming from implicit to overt prosody, but instead a processing advantage for contrasts in verb position over those in subject position, as well as an advantage for no-accent probes over contrastively accented ones. The experiment was repeated with participants separated into two groups on the basis of the overt prosody they produced when reading a passage aloud. Results showed that individual differences in the read-aloud production correlate with the response pattern in the cross-modal task. The results provide some initial evidence about the nature of the auditory image produced as inner speech during silent reading.

Exploring the Similarity Between Implicit and Explicit Prosody: Prosodic Phrasing and Individual Differences

“…These conclusions find some support in a study demonstrating a relation between implicit and explicit accentuation (i.e., prominence patterns rather than phrasing patterns) using speech from reading aloud. In two experiments, Speer and Foltz (2015) investigated readers' generation of implicit intonational pitch accents for sentences in different focus contexts. Participants in their study were presented with sentence pairs that either placed (5a) or did not place (5b) contrastive focus on the subject of the second sentence in a pair (the "test sentence," here in bold):…”

“…This first question derives largely from the findings in Swets et al (2007) and Speer and Foltz (2015), both of which demonstrate the relevance of individual differences. As described above, Swets and colleagues make the claim that working memory capacity (henceforth WMC) influences the size of the prosodic chunks that readers implicitly generate when reading text silently.…”

The Role of Fundamental Frequency and Temporal Envelope in Processing Sentences with Temporary Syntactic Ambiguities

“…An accurate reproduction of the sentence prosody, to the extent that it modeled the original stimulus recording, was viewed as an indicator of the participant’s correct (i.e., disambiguating) interpretation of the syntactic structure. Although there are individual differences in the production of prosodic patterns (e.g., Speer & Foltz, 2015), the results from production measures identify the prosodic cues that are used consistently (i.e., reliably) across participants to indicate the correct syntactic structure. Importantly, this study takes the view that the prosodic structure disambiguates sentences not just by the presence or absence of a prosodic boundary at a critical point in the utterance, but by its overall prosodic pattern (Carlson, Clifton, & Frazier, 2001; Carlson, 2009; Schafer et al, 2000; Speer et al, 2011).…”

Event-Related Potential Evidence of Implicit Metric Structure during Silent Reading

“…This hypothesis has been supported by behavioral evidence demonstrating similarity between real and imagined representations of a variety of prosodic phenomena, including intonation, phrasing, stress, and meter [4,5]. For example, evidence for implicit intonational structure is provided by the fact that readers are faster to recognize target words that are produced aloud with a previously imagined intonation contour [6,7]. Readers impose implicit phrase boundaries in sentences that are long enough to have a phrase break [8] and tend to balance the size of adjacent phrases even during silent reading [9,10], providing evidence for implicit prosodic phrasing.…”